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Our Machine 
Civilization 



By . 

RAYMOND B: FOSDICK 



An Address Delivered at the 

Commencement Exercises 

of 

Wellesley College, 

June 20, 1922 

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Printed through the courtesy of a friend of Wellesley 



an 

JUL It "«»?■ 






OUR MACHINE CIVILIZATION 

ONE hundred years ago this summer Harvard 
College graduated the class of 1822 with sixty 
members. The Commencement address was given by 
the Reverend John Kirkland and it was as dreary as 
Commencement addresses invariably are. It con- 
tained all the wise counsel and pious admoni- 
tion which age habitually gives to youth and which 
youth habitually disregards. Rut in the middle 
of that address, which now lies mouldering in 
the Harvard library as its author lies moulder- 
ing in his grave, the Reverend Mr. Kirkland 
said a rather startling thing. He referred to 
the world into which the sixty Harvard seniors 
were about to step as "a complex world." He seemed 
to infer that the simplicity of older days was gone 
and that life had become an involved and bewilder- 
ing process. I am, of course, aware that this has 
always been to some extent the reaction of old age. 
Life seems to speed up because age is slowing down. 
Rut with all allowance for this natural change in 
speed, it does seem a bit strange, does it not, particu- 
larly from the standpoint of 1922, that the world of 
1822 should have seemed to anybody to be complex. 
For think what the world was like in 1822. In 
all America, in all Europe, there was not a railroad, 
nor a telephone, nor a telegraph. The steamboat had 
just been tried out as a doubtful experiment. Travel 
was a painful and precarious undertaking, with the 
result that most people stayed home, living and dying 



where they were born. Students at Harvard College 
living at some distance came by way of the stage 
coach or on horseback. From South Framingham 
to Boston was a day's journey when the roads were 
good, and they were often bad. From Boston to New 
York was five days. When Samuel Morse, the 
painter and inventor, tried to get from Washington, 
D. C. to New Haven, Connecticut, to the bedside of 
his dying wife, it took him seven days. From one 
month to three months elapsed before European 
news reached the United States, and the battle of 
New Orleans with all its dreadful slaughter was 
fought in ignorance of the fact that weeks before, 
peace had been signed between England and Amer- 
ica in the city of Ghent in Belgium. 

But the world of 1822 had other differences. There 
were no electric lights, no sewing machines, no bath- 
tubs, no furnaces, no hot water faucets, no asphalt 
or macadam pavement, no sewer systems — in fact, 
none of the conveniences which have become an ac- 
cepted part of the life of 1922. In those days only 
a small proportion of the population lived in cities. 
The farm and village housed the rest. The factory 
system had only just developed — in connection with 
weaving and spinning — and the home was the unit 
and center of all the industrial arts. People lived 
for the most part simply and quietly, engaged in a 
routine of work from which, in generations, there 
had been but little variation. Indeed from the days 
of Barneses II and Moses down to the days of the 
Beverend Mr. Kirkland and our grandfathers, amaz- 
ingly few fundamental changes occured in the ma- 
le rial existence of common people. The physical 
factors of life were practically stereotyped. That 
long stretch of history is a story of human capacities 



undeveloped and natural resources unused. Trans- 
portation and communication were no more rapid 
a hundred years ago when the Reverend Mr. Kirk- 
land was exhorting the sixty Harvard seniors than 
they were with the ancient Egyptians. Nothing 
swifter than a horse was known to either Nebuchad- 
nezzar or Napoleon. The farmers around Wellesley 
in 1822 used the same methods and the same instru- 
ments that were used in the days of Julius Caesar. 

And remember this was only a hundred years ago. 
I am not talking about ancient history; I am talking 
of conditions of life in the days of our grandfathers. 

But there were other differences between those 
days and these. When Mr. Kirkland made his Com- 
mencement address, Charles Darwin was only thir- 
teen years old and the whole foundation of modern 
biology and modern philosophy as well was yet to 
be laid. Agassiz was fifteen years old; Sir Charles 
Lyell was twenty-five years old, and the crude geo- 
logical conceptions of Linnaeus and Lamarck were 
still in vogue. In the general field of chemistry and 
physics Michael Faraday was just beginning his 
work. In the field of medicine, Jenner was still alive, 
and his idea of vaccination against small-pox was 
just beginning to win its way. Lord Lister and 
Louis Pasteur were not yet born, and anesthetics 
and antiseptic surgery were unknown to the world. 
In the realm of astronomy, Pierre Laplace, who orig- 
inated the nebular hypothesis, was still alive, while 
J. C. Adams, his successor in the field of mathemat- 
ical astronomy, was only three years old. Many of 
the subjects which you young women have studied 
in your four years at Wellesley were unheard of. 
There was no such thing as experimental psychology, 



for example, and the word sociology did not exist 
in the English language. The average college cur- 
riculum of 1822 consisted principally of Latin, Greek 
and mathematics, sweetened with a dash of what 
was called "natural philosophy," and accompanied 
by liberal doses of the theology of Jonathan 
Edwards. 

This, then, is what the world was like in 1822 when 
the Reverend John Kirkland called it complex. It 
was a world just waking from a long sleep. It was 
a world that was rubbing its eyes in the presence 
of new forces. If that world seemed complex to the 
sixty Harvard seniors of the Class of 1822, what does 
the present world seem to us! 

For between that time and this, between the days 
of our grandfathers and ourselves, has occurred the 
mightiest revolution in history. It has completely 
changed the whole complexion of human life. It 
has fundamentally altered our daily habits; it has 
not only modified our environment, but has thor- 
oughly revolutionized it; it has split the anciently 
established order into a thousand fragments. Since 
the days of Assyria and Babylon — indeed since the 
days of our Neolithic forefathers — nothing has oc- 
curred which has so completely and in so short a 
time changed the method and manner of living of 
the human race, as the mechanical revolution of the 
nineteenth century. 

For think what has happened. With the advent 
of steam and electricity we have annihilated the dif- 
ficulties of space and distance. When Napoleon was 
retreating in headlong fashion from Moscow, it took 
him 312 hours to complete the last leg of his journey 
from Vilna to Paris. Any traveller can now do it 
in less than 48 hours by railroad or in 8 hours by 



airplane. We cross the ocean in five days, where a 
century ago it took two months. We fly by airplane 
from one city to another, from one country to an- 
other, in a few hours' time. Our fast mails go by 
airplane. In our automobiles we pass from state to 
state and see in a day more than our grandfathers 
could have covered in a month. By cable and wire- 
less we are in immediate and constant touch with 
the uttermost parts of the earth. With our own 
voices we talk to our friends a thousand miles away. 
Seated in our own libraries we hear concerts and 
lectures that are hurled to us through the air from 
500 miles or more away. We hear Galli-Curci and 
Sembrich in our own homes, and Caruso returns 
from the dead to sing to us. Events that few could 
witness are brought to the whole human race on the 
celluloid film: we see the King of England walk 
through Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath on the 
tomb of the unknown soldier, and we see and hear 
the President of the United States speaking in Arling- 
ton Cemetery. If the Reverend Mr. Kirkland, who 
winced at the complexity of 1822, could return to us 
today, what would he think of our generation! 

But the scientific revolution has done a thousand 
other things. It has given us not only new commodi- 
ties but new substances. We juggle with the atoms 
of carbon and hydrogen and the rest, and create ma- 
terials that Nature herself has not formed. We 
make carborundum and acetylene gas and celluloid 
and hundreds of other compounds which we use in 
our daily lives. What we formerly obtained from 
plants and animals we now manufacture. We make 
dyes and medicines from coal tar; we extract sugar 
from beets; we make perfume out of garbage, and 
foodstuffs out of sewage. From corn we take a hun- 



dred useful products ranging all the way from salad 
oil for our tables to the erasers on our pencils. Lux- 
uries that were formerly the monopoly of the privi- 
leged few are now the common property of every- 
body. Medicines such as a prince could not have 
had a century ago are now at hand to cure the pauper. 
Vegetables and fruits, exotic and out of season, are 
upon our dinner table. Our daily food is brought 
from China, from the West Indies, and from the 
far islands of the Pacific. The royal purple of the 
ancients, and dyes far more beautiful than they 
knew, are now to be had on the bargain counter. 

But the scientific revolution has not only added to 
our conveniences; it has altered our methods of liv- 
ing. Our populations are no longer predominantly 
rural. They live in huge cities, crowded together 
in communities such as the world never knew be- 
fore. The day of individual work, for one's own 
needs, in one's own way and in one's own time, has 
gone. Instead, men work in vast factories, engaged 
on minute contributions to the finished article. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of men work underground, dig- 
ging the coal to feed the monster industrial machine. 
Millions of men, women and children toil feverishly 
to keep it going, and the whole system is so incon- 
ceivably intricate and so closely articulated that dis- 
location in one part of it affects all the rest, and in- 
dustrial cohesiveness has come to be a more essen- 
tial factor in the world than political cohesiveness. 
For example, you cannot have clothes without a 
cotton mill; you cannot have a cotton mill without 
machinery; you cannot have machinery without 
steel; you cannot have steel without iron; you can- 
not smelt iron without coal; you cannot have coal 



without railroads to bring it to you; you cannot have 
railroads without involving a hundred occupations 
and enterprises. Civilization has in fact become a 
great machine, the wheels of which must be kept 
turning, or the people starve. For millions of human 
beings it is a vast treadmill, worked by weary feet 
to grind the corn that makes the bread that gives 
them strength to walk the treadmill. 

And with it all has come the speeding up of life, 
and the spirit of hurry and worry such as our grand- 
fathers with all their lack of conveniences never 
dreamed of even in their nightmares. The human 
race lives by schedule, according to a stereotyped 
routine. Life has become more and more a stand- 
ardized process, in which there is little of serenity 
or of leisure. We hurry from birth to death, goaded 
only to greater haste by our increasingly speedy con- 
veyances, feverishly trying to catch up with the ma- 
chinery which we have ourselves created. Truly 
this is a complex world. The sixty Harvard seniors 
of the Class of 1822 would stand aghast at our hectic 
civilization. 

And with the increase of machinery has come the 
increase of human knowledge. Rather it is the in- 
crease of knowledge that has made all these inven- 
tions possible. For the scientific revolution of the 
nineteenth century was born of a great intellectual 
curiosity and a new method of approach. When 
Francis Bacon first emphasized the importance of 
the experimental method as an approach to human 
knowledge, he was sowing the seed which began to 
develop to its full fruition in the nineteenth century. 
The old accepted facts of nature were tested and 
analyzed. Nature herself was put in the witness box 
and experiment was the interrogating counsel. All 



the phenomena of life, whether pertaining to the 
body, the brain, or the soul, were haled for exam- 
ination before the court. Under the stimulus of this 
method, we have pushed back the boundaries of 
human knowledge far, far beyond where they were 
a century ago. In biology, in surgery, in medicine, 
in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and in a score of 
other sciences, we have wrenched the facts from 
nature by a process of cross-examination which 
would not be denied. As the inquiries have grown 
in detail and complexity, dozens of new sciences 
have been added to the list. The body of knowledge 
has developed bewilderingly. The long-hidden se- 
crets of life are slowly becoming ours. We have 
traced man back to the Tertiary Period and we are 
reaching long fingers of inquiry into the universe of 
which we form so minute a part, and beyond this 
universe into other universes, where life and intelli- 
gence may exist, far transcending our tiny compre- 
hension. We are almost intoxicated with the new 
knowledge. We stand on tiptoe before each new 
promise of discovery, feverishly awaiting its out- 
come. The telescope, the microscope, the spectro- 
scope, are daily bringing us information that leaves 
us gasping; and we are stunned by the realization 
that in this thirsty search for knowledge we are just 
at the beginning of the way. Ahead of us lies a long, 
rising road, with ever-broadening outlooks on either 
side. 

This is the kind of complex world into which your 
class is stepping. A hundred years ago it is conceiv- 
able that a man might acquire and digest a fairly 
substantial proportion of the body of human knowl- 
edge. At least he could easily find a point of orien- 
tation from which he could intelligently survey the 



course, and keep up with the progress of the march. 
Today this is utterly impossible. In the growing 
complexity of knowledge one can scarcely find his 
way. Whole groups of conclusions must be accepted 
without analysis or examination, and most of the 
departments of learning we cannot even enter. In 
your four years at Wellesley you young women have 
scarcely touched the garment's hem of human knowl- 
edge. If you have obtained the scantiest outline, or 
a point of view, or a method of approach, you have 
gotten all that any college can hope to give to its 
graduates. 

I wonder if you have seen in this long analysis that 
I have made where my thought is leading. Compara- 
tively speaking, what a simple task those sixty 
Harvard seniors faced when they stepped out into 
the world a hundred years ago and upon what simple 
responsibilities they entered! The environment of 
their lives was so easily understood and controlled. 
The problems of daily existence were so reasonably 
adapted to their capacities. You young women, on 
the other hand, are projected into a world so com- 
plex, into an environment so baffling, that few in- 
dividuals can understand it all, and fewer still can 
control it. You have been educated for leadership 
at a time when leadership is increasingly vital in the 
service of men and increasingly difficult to establish. 
You will be tested with cruel burdens in a way your 
grandfathers never were tested. You must carry re- 
sponsibilities that would have broken the backs of 
your forebears a century ago. This is the price that 
you pay for your privileges here at Wellesley; this 
is the penalty of education in this generation. The 
thing that you win today is not a reward, but a re- 



sponsibility; not an easy entrance to a quiet and 
agreeable life, but a crushing obligation to lead your 
generation in such fashion that it may indeed be- 
come the master of its environment. 

I wish I could paint the nature of that obligation 
as I see it this morning without seeming to use merely 
resounding and empty words. Perhaps I can illus- 
trate what I mean by an example from the field of 
government, although this is just one department of 
life in which difficulties are multiplying. Govern- 
ment a hundred years ago was a comparatively sim- 
ple affair. It dealt with matters that were easily 
within the scope of intelligence of the average man. 
In its practical aspects there was little that was tech- 
nical about it. Locally it had to do with good roads 
and water supply and common lands and other mat- 
ters, which could readily be considered in town 
meeting and upon which the least intelligent could 
have an opinion that might be valuable. Even in its 
national aspect government was not complex. There 
were few technical bureaus and those that existed 
did not affect the daily lives of the citizens. There 
was no problem of transportation, because there 
were no railroads; there was no perilous conflict be- 
tween capital and labor, because there were no ma- 
chines, no mass production, and no specialization of 
industry. The scope of government in those days 
was largely negative. It was built around the prin- 
ciple of thou shalt not, and was based on simple 
moralities which appealed to the understanding and 
reason of the average man. 

But those days are gone. The scientific revolution 
has wiped them out as completely as if Ihey had 
never existed. Government has become infinitely 
complex and technical. It has to do for the most 

10 



part with matters which are far beyond the intelli- 
gence of the average citizen. It deals with compli- 
cated bond issues, with subtle transportation prob- 
lems, with involved plans of taxation and tariff, 
with technical educational projects, and with a hun- 
dred other matters, which directly affect our lives 
and happiness, and in regard to which we are called 
upon to express our opinion as citizens. Conse- 
quently, the breach between the citizenship and its 
government is widening as science increases the com- 
plexity of its operations. Our elections, many of 
them, are fought out on the basis of issues about 
which we voters have no intelligent conception what- 
soever, nor could a majority of us acquire such a con- 
ception even if there were time and machinery for 
our education. Frankly the situation has gotten 
beyond us. Even in my time in New York City I 
have seen the function of government increase in 
elaborateness and complexity until now there are 
few people who really understand all its technical 
complications. Government is getting out of the 
hands of the people, not in the sense that anybody 
is taking it away from them, but in the sense that 
with the rapid extension of its technical aspects, it 
is becoming more and more difficult to comprehend 
and control. 

It is right at this point that we often make a fun- 
damentally erroneous assumption. We assume that 
man's capacity keeps up with his inventions. We 
assume that as civilization becomes great, the human 
stock which is building it also becomes great; that 
somehow or other, by some alchemy or other, there 
is a rise in individual capacity from generation to 
generation to match the increasing complexity of 
our physical environment. We seem to take it for 

11 



granted that there is some sure inhibition that would 
prevent men from creating machines which they 
could not control; and that the very fact that they 
have created them is proof of their ability to man- 
age them. 

But this is not the fact. Knowledge may mean 
power, but it does not necessarily mean capacity. 
We cannot be dogmatically sure that there has been 
substantial improvement in the human stock since 
the days of the Egyptians or the Greeks. The men 
who labored with their hands to build Cheops' pyra- 
mid probably had wit enough and intelligence enough 
to use a steam hoist and a concrete-mixer if these 
inventions had been given to them. Even less sure 
can we be that this last century which has added 
so tremendously to our mechanical environment has 
brought a corresponding improvement in human 
capacity. In fact we know that it is not true. Men 
were no less able in the days of Washington and 
Hamilton, and Channing and Fox than they are to- 
day. We have come into our new inheritance with 
no greater abilities than our grandfathers had. The 
difference between the Harvard Class of 1822 and the 
Wellesley Class of 1922 lies not in their respective 
capacities, but in the loads which those capacities 
must bear. 

In this field of government, therefore, our task is 
to control complex functions like subways and street 
railroad financing with the same intelligence that 
was adapted to the spade and the blacksmith shop. 
The machinery of our environment is increasing in 
complexity, but the tools of control remain largely 
the same. 

And how faulty those tools may be we are only 
just now beginning to realize. We have always 

12 



thought of the American people — our own people — 
as being peculiarly intelligent. We have had a con- 
scious pride in the ability of the average man and in 
our great experiment of democracy, based on the 
principle of equality of responsibility. And now 
come the statistics of the government gathered from 
our army during the war, when for the first time we 
had the opportunity of testing by modern scientific 
methods the intelligence of a substantial cross-sec- 
tion of our people. Of the white draft — that is, the 
white soldiers as opposed to negroes— thirty per cent 
were found to be unable to read and understand 
newspapers or to write letters home. Forty-seven 
and three-tenths per cent of the white draft fell be- 
low the mental age of thirteen years, only one year 
over the maximum mental age of what are generally 
known as morons. Forty-seven and three-tenths per 
cent! Sixty-six and two-thirds per cent of the white 
draft tested below a percentage that marked the 
minimum capacity necessary to carry on the so- 
called paper work of the army — that is, making re- 
ports and keeping the files. Out of all those millions 
of drafted men just a third had ability enough to 
carry on this by no means laborious type of mental 
work. 

The appalling significance of these statistics it is 
impossible to escape. They cannot be explained 
away. We had the best blood of America in the 
army. Those men represented certainly our average 
intelligence and capacity. They reflected our citizen- 
ship with substantial accuracy. And yet thirty per 
cent of them were unable to read and write, and 
nearly fifty per cent fell below a mental age of thir- 
teen years! These are the people upon whom our 
complex life is placing its gigantic responsibilities. 

13 



These are the human tools through which we fondly 
hope that all this unintelligible machinery of civiliza- 
tion may somehow or other be intelligently con- 
trolled. 

I say therefore that you young women are facing 
the supreme challenge of human history, and I re- 
peat that your diploma today is not a reward but a 
crushing obligation. The future looms like an angry 
cloud, and whatever of leadership and spiritual 
force you have gained here at Wellesley is needed 
now more than at any other moment in the progress 
of the race. 

For it cannot be denied that humanity stands to- 
day in a position of peril. One great, unanswered 
question is written across the future in letters of fire : 
Is man to be the master of the civilization he has 
created, or is he to be its victim? Can he control 
the forces which he has himself let loose? Will this 
intricate machinery which he has built up and this 
vast body of knowledge which he has appropriated 
be the servant of the race, or will it be a Frankenstein 
monster that will slay its own maker? In brief, has 
man the capacity to keep up with his own machines? 

This is the supreme question before us. All other 
problems that confront us are merely its corrollaries. 
And the necessity of a right answer is perhaps more 
immediate than we realize. For science is not stand- 
ing still. In speaking of the scientific revolution I 
was not speaking of a phenomenon that was confined 
to the nineteenth century. Rather we are just at the 
beginning of the revolution. We could not stop it if 
we would. It is advancing by leaps and bounds, gain- 
ing in impetus with each year. It is giving us more 
machines, faster machines, machines increasingly 
more intricate and complex. Life in the future will 

14 



be speeded up infinitely beyond the present. Sources 
of energy will be tapped and harnessed far out-rival- 
ling what we have today. There lies in full view 
before us a realm of discovery in physical science till 
now untrodden by mortals even in their dreams. The 
pioneers are already upon the road to this promised 
land. In California at the present moment a com- 
bined attack, financed and equipped on a huge scale, 
is being launched on the problem of the structure of 
matter; and the same search is being feverishly 
prosecuted in laboratories all over the world. We 
now know that in atoms of matter there exists a 
store of energy incomparably more abundant and 
powerful than any over which we have thus far ob- 
tained control. If once we can liberate this force, 
what machines we can build! Steam and electricity 
will be an anachronism at which our children will 
laugh as we laugh at the hand-loom and the spinning 
wheel. With a pound weight of this radioactive sub- 
stance we will get as much energy as we now obtain 
from 150 tons of coal. Or another pound weight 
can be made to do the work of 150 tons of dynamite. 

Aye, there's the rub. One hundred and fifty tons 
of dynamite — enough to blow the city of Boston into 
oblivion — compressed to a pound weight which might 
be held in the hand! Do you wonder that a sober- 
thinking scientist like Professor Frederick Soddy of 
Oxford University should say "I trust this discovery 
will not be made until it is clearly understood what 
is involved." "And yet," he goes on to say, "it is 
a discovery that is sooner or later bound to come. 
Conceivably it might be made tomorrow." 

You see what the problem is. Science will not 
wait for man to catch up. It does not hold itself 
responsible for the morals or capacities of its human 

15 



employers. It gives us a fire engine with which to 
throw water to extinguish a fire; if we want to use 
the engine to throw kerosene on the fire, that is our 
lookout. The engine is adapted to both purposes. 
With the same hand, science give us X-rays and ma- 
chine guns, modern surgery and high explosives, 
anesthetics and poison gas. In brief, science has mul- 
tiplied man's physical powers ten thousand fold and 
in like ratio has increased his capacity both for con- 
struction and destruction. How is that capacity to 
be used in the future? How can we hold in check 
the increasing physical power of disruptive influ- 
ences? Have we spiritual assets enough to counter- 
balance the new forces? How can we breed a greater 
average intelligence? Can education run fast enough, 
not only to overcome the lead which science has 
obtained, but to keep abreast in the race? 

These are ugly questions and they carry with them 
a perilous significance. They are hurled as a chal- 
lenge to your generation, and upon their answer de- 
pends the whole future of the race. And what are 
the answers? Let us be perfectly frank about the 
matter: No intelligent person in my generation — if 
for a moment I may associate myself with the elder 
statesmen — pretends to know. We are wandering in 
heart-breaking perplexity, swamped with the para- 
phernalia of living, weighed down by mountains of 
facts, trying to find some sure way out of this jungle 
of machinery and untamed powers. And the tragedy 
of it all is that there was a time when we thought 
we knew the answers to the riddles that this modern 
life of ours was propounding. Up until 1914 most of 
us were fairly confident of the result, fairly easy 
about the future. We talked glibly of the direction 

16 



and goal of human evolution, and of the bright pros- 
pects of the race. But now we know that we did not 
know. We were misled by superficial hopes, blinded 
by false assumptions. Those four years of slaughter, 
and those added four years of chaos and misery that 
have followed since the Armistice, have given us a 
perspective we did not have before. We see now the 
abyss upon the edge of which the race is standing. 
We see the inevitable doom that lies ahead unless 
we can achieve a measure of social control far 
greater than any which we have hitherto exercised. 
Bewildered and disillusioned, my generation turns 
to yours — and upon your shoulders falls the weary 
weight of all this unintelligible world. Out of all 
times and peoples, a capricious fate seems to have 
singled your day and your generation upon which 
to center its heaviest responsibilities. 

I do not know how you are going to attack this 
problem of strengthening the social controls. I have 
no specific advice to offer. With the tragic failures 
of my own generation in mind, I would have some 
reluctance about lecturing you on the principles of 
success, even if I knew what they were. My genera- 
tion has been far more modest since 1914, far less 
confident and dogmatic. I presume, however, that 
in your program, education will play an increasingly 
important part, although what kind of education is 
best adapted to this crisis, and how it is to be applied, 
my generation cannot tell you. Surely let us hope 
that in your time no such damning charge will be 
leveled against you as has been brought against us: 
that thirty per cent of the people of free America are 
unable to read and write, and that nearly half our 
population has a mental age of less than thirteen 
years. 

17 



And after education, what? Frankly I do not 
know. In the confused councils of my generation 
many things are being advocated. There are those 
who claim that the environmental attack upon which 
my generation has put such emphasis cannot pos- 
sibly succeed and that the only hope of the future 
lies in improving the quality of the human stock by 
the introduction of better strains. Consequently the 
science of eugenics is attracting ever wider attention. 
There are others who claim that the hope of the 
world does not lie in democracy — because the com- 
plications of civilization make mass-verdict of value 
only in the simpler issues — but lies rather in an aris- 
tocracy of leadership, recruited from all classes of 
society on the basis of merit. There are still others 
who look for social control only in a fundamental 
reorganization of human society, with the purpose 
of revising the attitude of men toward wealth pro- 
duction and distribution. Still others are looking for 
a solution in social cooperation — if only it can be 
brought about — not only as between individuals 
within a class, but as between classes within a nation 
and nations within a league. Again, there are many 
of us who fervently believe that the spirit of Chris- 
tianity contains the key to the solution of this great 
crisis, if only that spirit can be practically applied. 
How this is to be done in comprehensive fashion, 
however, my generation cannot tell you, and we hang 
our heads in shame at our own failure. 

You see with what confusion the discussion is being 
carried on in the councils of my generation. There 
is no unanimity of opinion; indeed, very little co- 
herence of opinion. Like those who built the Tower 
of Babel in the land of Shinar, we are smitten with 
many tongues and many counsels. 



But one thing we know : the way out of this morass, 
if it is found, will be found by a leadership of intel- 
ligence. It will be discovered by knowledge con- 
sciously applied to the task. For that leadership and 
that knowledge we cannot look to the many. We 
must look to the few. We must look largely to that 
handful of men and women who each year come 
from our universities. That is why your graduation 
today is so significant an event. It contains a prom- 
ise for the future; it holds out a hope of healthier 
days. There is here in your group the possibility of 
vision and creative leadership such as the world 
needs now more than at any time in its history. 

So I welcome you to the grim struggle that awaits 
you. You are joining the ranks of a gallant army — 
the army of the Kingdom of the Spirit. It has fought 
in many ages on many a field and has many times 
been vanquished. Just now it is desperately hard- 
pressed. Its ranks are torn and its flags are going 
down. It is being attacked by an enemy far more 
powerful and determined than any with which it has 
previously fought. It badly needs the reinforcement 
which you are bringing. If you can come with more 
intelligence, more resourcefulness, and more devo- 
tion than previous generations have shown, the day 
may be saved. But if your generation fails, as the 
generation for which I speak failed in all the years 
that led up to 1914, then there is little hope, "and we 
are here as on a darkling plain, 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle 

and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

God give you high courage in the army of the King- 
dom of the Spirit! 



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